On Monday 06 July 2009, Dave Crossland wrote:
> CORS has a precedent in Firefox, and no one objects to it.
It's a side discussion, but just to correct that statement: I *do*
object to a dependency on HTTP.
The slashes[*] inside an HTTP URL help to abbreviate URLs, but imply
nothing about who owns the resource. (Akamai would own half the world's
most popular files, it it were otherwise; and the Internet Archive
would own the rest.) Additionally, not all URLs are HTTP URLs: think of
e-mail message identifiers, p2p protocols, ISBN numbers, data URLs,
etc.
If it is important to know that font A is licensed for use with document
B, then that information should stay with the font, no matter where the
font is copied to: another server, a local hard disk, a CD, a zip file,
the Internet Archive, Akamai's network, Gnutella, etc. Formats like
EOT[3], Thomas Lord's multipart files[2], or OpenType with
modified/extra tables[4,5] make that possible. CORS[1] doesn't (and
wasn't designed to do so).
[*] Tim Berners-Lee has said[7] that the mistake he made in HTTP URLs is
the double slash. Its existence limits the content provider and
confuses the content consumer. E.g., the EOT URL[3] should have been
http:/org/w3/www/Submission/EOT/. How much is handled by a DNS server
and how much by an HTTP server is up to the content provider, no need
for the client to know that.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/
[2] http://noeot.com/mame.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/Submission/EOT/
[4] http://www.w3.org/Fonts/Misc/minutes-2008-10#Compromise
[5]
http://blog.fontembedding.com/post/2009/06/10/New-Web-Fonts-Proposal.aspx
[7] http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.3337
Bert
--
Bert Bos ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/http://www.w3.org/people/bos W3C/ERCIM
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